Titanic Data Analysis - Did Passengers Get Their Money's Worth?

You may have read about the City of Charlotte's "Business Analysis Olympiad" where 12 teams of analysts from across the city departments competed in an analytical showdown. It was quite the event and Jock Mackinlay's blog post gives all the details. Data Administration Specialist Doris Phillips had the original idea to hold the Business Analysis Olympiad. And it was James Raper, Manager of Data Administration, who made the most of the suggestion and orchestrated the event.

Several weeks ago well before the Olympiad, Doris took the first crack at analyzing data about Titanic passengers. She shared her visual analysis with both the Oracle Developer Tools Users Group (ODTUG) and with us at Tableau. And were we knocked out by her work. Titanic buffs will of course enjoy this (there are a lot of people who study the Titanic story - and I don't mean the movie). But even if you don't have much of an interest in the fate of the Titanic, you'll still be fascinated by her visualization work.

Prestigious Computing Publication Honors Tableau Founders' Original Research

Tableau Software was recently honored by the computer science publication, Communications of the ACM (CACM). 50,000+ members of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) just received the November issue featuring a research paper by Chris Stolte, Diane Tang and Pat Hanrahan. Titled "Polaris: A System for Query, Analysis, and Visualization of Multidimensional Databases", it's about their invention Polaris, now called VizQL, the founding technology under Tableau Software. It also includes a foreword by Jim Gray, a pioneer, legend and brilliant mind in computer science. Jim Gray’s name may sound familiar; he’s the computer scientist who unfortunately went missing off the San Francisco Bay 2 years ago. Pat Hanrahan's recent blog entry describes how important Jim was to his and Chris's research.

Tableau 4.1 Introduces WMS Mapping Support

Great news for those of you who are into analytical mapping. Today, Tableau Software released version 4.1 which offers many new enhancements including the ability to use WMS (Web Map Service) map images as background maps for your data visualizations in Tableau Desktop. I personally like some of the satellite maps we've found. 4.1 also offers other enhancements, including Server performance improvements and Active Directory improvements.

Do You Say Coke, Soda or Pop? A Map Visualization Shows Your Likely Answer

A good Tableau customer, Michael Cristiani of Market Intelligence Group, recently sent us a challenge. He had discovered a dataset for which people were surveyed about their choice of words for their preferred icy, carbonated beverage. Specifically, did they use the word “coke”, “soda”, “pop” or some other word? There were nice maps on the site but with Tableau 4.0’s new mapping capabilities, he wanted to know what we could do with the data. Given that I was in a hotel room when I read about this, I decided to give it a go with Tableau 4.0 (beats renting a bad movie) and came up with some interesting results.

Sparklines - Easier Than I Thought

I recently had to look at a lot of data categories as their values moved through time. I wanted to embed these graphs in a Word document to succinctly and effectively provide visual context to my discussion points. I originally thought I would use one graph with multiple color-encoded lines but realized that it would not be very effective in my document. There were too many lines overlapping each other and you couldn't really discern what was happening for each category.

I remembered what Edward Tufte and Stephen Few recommend - sparklines - and used Tableau to create them quickly and easily.

Tableau 4.0 Now Available - Mapping & Embedding Just 2 of the Major New Features

Tableau's 4.0 release is now available! This is no doubt one of our most significant releases. New features include one-click analytical map creation, usability enhancements to help both new and long-time users, and capabilities to embed and share live Tableau views with other applications such as Web applications, intranets and documents. Tableau 4.0 is available for download and a "new features" website has all the details.

EagerEyes Blog Lists Top 10 Information Visualization Influences on Tableau’s Jock Mackinlay

I love it when people much more knowledgeable than I give me inside views into what shaped them. It’s fascinating to see what influenced them as they developed into the industry experts we know. EagerEyes.org, a terrific blog with lots of resources on information visualization, recently asked Tableau’s own Dr. Jock Mackinlay to name his top 10 influences.

Online videos of Stephen Few and Pat Hanrahan keynotes at Tuesday's Tableau Conference

Check out our on-the-spot video recordings of keynote speakers from Day Two (Tuesday, July 22) of Tableau's first ever Customer Conference. They include videos of Stephen Few and Pat Hanrahan.

Online videos of Monday's keynotes - nearly live and in person

Check out our on-the-spot video recordings of keynote speakers from Day One (Monday, July 20)...

+ Christian Chabot assesses where analytics has been and is going, highlights key capabilities of Tableau 4.0 and shares his vision of Tableau's future. Watch the video - about 45 minutes.

+ Chris Stolte, along with 3 of Tableau's key developers, showcases and demos the new capablities of Tableau 4.0 real-time. Watch the video - about 45 minutes.

Customers Learning While We Learn From Customers

Nearly 200 of our best customers are here in Seattle at the Tableau Customer Conference with us enjoying the fine weather and learning about upcoming release, Tableau 4.0. We're at maximum capacity. Here are three interactions I had with customers where I discovered something new about how analyics are proliferating.